June 14 2024 The Painted Bird, I: and a celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday June 14

On this the birthday of Jerzy Kosinski, I reflect on and interrogate my personal relationship and history with his great novel, which I used as an intertext and mirror in healing from trauma during my teenage years, much as did he in reimagining his childhood therapy journal as he was psychosomatically mute for five years after Liberation by the Russian Army at the age of nine.

I too created myself as revolutionary struggle during this crucial period of growing up, framed by my witness at the age of nine of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, our nation’s most massive incident of police terror in which I was near or momentarily dead from the force wave of a grenade, and my near execution by a police death squad in Sao Paulo Brazil in 1974 during my direct actions with the Matadors to rescue the abandoned street children who were being bounty hunted in a state campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Identity confusion and self-creation as freedom from authorized identities and imposed orders of being, meaning and value, from the boundaries of the Forbidden and other people’s ideas of virtue, the mark of Otherness conferred by death, Last Stands in defiance of authority and carceral states of force and control beyond hope of victory or survival, and the existential crisis of becoming human in liberation struggle against the systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization which arise from the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; in all of this I found reflection in Jerzy Kosinski’s embrace of our monstrosity and fearless gaze into the Nietzschean Abyss and what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness.

The Painted Bird, I.

As I have written in celebration of Jerzy Kosinski’s birthday:

Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski.

His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, a Pauline Absurdism like that of Flannery O’Connor and referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of his training as a sociologist and historian in the Soviet university system of Poland behind the Iron Curtain, prior to his escape to political asylum in America.

Jerzy Kosinski embraces the Infinite as the Absurd; though his works can create the effect of reading Samuel Beckett, Kobo Abe, or Thomas Ligotti, his intent is to tilt against Nihilism and the forces of disorder, not to endorse them. His episodes which reveal the depravity of humankind and the fallenness of political authority, like those of Jean Genet’s novels, are inversions of Catholic rituals intended as satires of the state as embodied violence.

In some respects he can be compared to de Sade, but only to a point; where de Sade was a satirist who wrote as a revolutionary act and campaign of destabilization against the authority of Church and State, Jerzy Kosinski plays the opposite side of the board, marshalling conserving forces to defend absolute and universal human values.

For his novels, often thinly veiled autobiographies and referential to historical events, are manuals of survival in circumstances of overwhelming force, dehumanizing oppression, and existential terror as systems of oppression.

Among these we may include his satires of American culture including Being There, and the magnificent nightmare of Europe under fascism, The Painted Bird. His finest nonfiction is The Future is Ours, Comrade, written within two years of his 1957 escape from Poland under Soviet dominion. All of his works bear the weight of his scholarship as a historian and sociologist.

His novels are metafictional commentaries on the roles he played in life, both chosen and those forced on him by others. Perhaps only Philip Roth has struggled more as a writer for control of his own identity, when those whom he claimed he not in turn claim him, and few have suffered more. I believe that each of us has the right as human beings to reinvent ourselves, and to be who we choose.

Being There is a precious and delicate confection of a fable, which transforms a universal myth into a new one for our time in spare language that a child might grasp. The film version starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine is also compelling and beautiful; I made a practice of watching it every month for years since I was at university, and rereading the novel which I taught in high school. It has become a part of who I am, this story, and I hope that you will love it as do I. But before I can take you on a walk through this novel, we must understand its context in the novel for which it is a coda, The Painted Bird.

The Painted Bird is an unforgettable paen of horrors as lived by the author as a child wandering alone in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, victimized and powerless, a figure of Europe, civilization, and all humanity.

I cannot say I advise anyone to open the lid of this particular box and look within; I cannot even say that it is good for you. Exposure to evil of this magnitude and festering malignity, raw and unanswerable, is a disruptive and corrosive, destabilizing and subversive event, at once destruction and liberation, much like the history it describes. Here the boundaries of the human are charted.

What has it done for me, this Pandora’s Box of a story? Perhaps only to help me find the will to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. For myself, this has been enough.

I have lost count of such Last Stands during my decades of revolutionary struggle and resistance to fascism since that fateful day in 1982 Beirut during the siege, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had appropriated from that of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 and set me on my life’s path. I too have looked into the Abyss, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me, since Mariupol and possibly before, and I must now and always question my actions as a man without fear, mercy, or remorse.

I am become as history has made me, a monster who hunts other monsters; with death the alternative to survival, with subjugation, falsification, and dehumanization pervasive and omnipresent existential threats on the one hand and those truths written in our flesh and to which we must bear witness, and our glorious liberty and uniqueness on the other, and with only solidarity and our faith in each other to heal the pathology of our disconnectedness and the divisions of authorized identities as elite hierarchies of otherness and belonging, love to redeem the flaws of our humanity, and hope to answer the terror of our nothingness and the brokenness of the world, we each of us must struggle to become human, even when we must trade fragments of our humanity for the hope of future possibilities of becoming human and for the lives of others, who may one day escape the shadows of history in which we dwell.

Last Stands; naming these forlorn hopes so makes them sound grand and heroic, but they are nothing of the kind. Not acts of virtue bearing the force of redemption, but choices to remain Unconquered as a free and self-created being conferred by refusal to submit against unanswerable force and impossible odds; a human thing, and a power which cannot be taken from us. As Jean Genet said to me on that fateful day, in a burning house, in a time of darkness, in a lost cause; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

Each of these Defining Moments has created unique imaginal spaces as mimesis which cannot be escaped; I will forever be crawling through tunnels of utter darkness covered in the blood of those I could not save while the earth trembles with impending collapse as I was in Mariupol 2022, and numberless other such moments. But as in Camus’ allegory of Sisyphus I bore the burden of my humanity onward and became Unconquered and free, and so can you.

This is what is important; to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as Genet’s Oath of the Resistance goes. What matters are not the horrors I have survived and which have shaped me to the thing that I am, a monster who hunts other monsters, and who has traded pieces of his humanity to do so and win a space of free creative play and time for others to discover and create new kinds of human being, meaning, and value which I may never find or dream; but that in refusal to submit I emerged from the darkness and despair into the light, and so can we all.

We may not be able to escape the legacies of our history or the consequences of our humanity, nor find balance for the terror of our nothingness nor bring healing to the brokenness of the world; but we can refuse to submit and become Unconquered as free and unique beings, a power which cannot be taken from us and can return us to ourselves.

In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.

Here follows my celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday:

A novel translated from his native Polish and reconstructed from notes written while the author was psychosomatically mute for five years after his liberation by Russia at the age of nine, as a therapy journal, it is unique among the literature of madness and psychoanalysis. The Painted Bird is the voice of this traumatized child; its authenticity is incontestable even though the government of Poland has attempted to discredit it as the Witness of History as part of its policy of denial as regards complicity in the Holocaust.

Of this I say: evil wears many masks. It can be massively destructive when given the authorized power of governments, armies, official papers and decrees, but this is not its exclusive domain, nor where it is born.

For the tortures and abuse suffered by the narrator are not inflicted upon him by officials carrying out a policy or because he is a member of a persecuted group like the Jews, though he is sometimes mistaken for a gypsy, but by ordinary villagers simply because they can. Indeed, much of the novel is a series of episodic vignettes in which brutalized villagers commit unspeakable crimes against one another. These episodes form a journey of initiation and are organized as Stations of the Cross: labyrinthine as is the symbolism of a great cathedral.

The universality of evil and the depravity of man are the subjects of his great work, and this is what elevates it beyond the conditions of time and place. The Painted Bird affirms traditional values in that it cleaves to the interpretation of the Bible on which our government is based, derived from the idea of sin. In the absence of the restraining force of law, the most ruthless tyrant or criminal wins. As George Washington said, “Government is about force, only force.”

True, the social use of force cuts many ways, especially when wielded by the juggernaut of governments; my point is that Jerzy Kosinski has written a very Catholic novel which offers an apologetics of law and order any government might welcome. That this is not generally understood may be due to no one having thought to compare him to Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, or other fellow Catholic authors with whom he belongs.

Indeed, The Painted Bird has been misunderstood as Holocaust literature and originally misrepresented by the publisher as nonfictional testimony, which backfired as it made the author and his work vulnerable to the lies of his political foes. He himself became a Painted Bird, ostracized and tormented by his fellows both as a child and as an author, and both functioning on the basis of a public denial of his identity as a Polish Catholic. The tribes he claimed did not in turn claim him, as his faith led him to identify evil as a universal human flaw and not the intrusive weapon of a despised enemy outsider.

The Painted Bird thematically recapitulates Measure For Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded. Jerzy Kosinski has organized and fictionalized his therapy journal along lines paralleling the Bard’s play, while reversing its revolutionary critique of authorized force.

Running through all his novels are interlinked narratives supporting Freud’s theory that humans are polymorphosly perverse until they learn to control their animal nature, and against Rousseau’s idea that the natural man is not bound by social contracts made prior to his birth or without his consent and participation, and may without concern disregard such laws, which is the legal basis of the American Declaration of Independence and a keystone of the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Constitution. And so we have the doctrine of Natural Law, a startling bit of anarchy at the founding of our nation, which goes directly to the heart of Jerzy Kosinski’s theme of power relations and defense of a universal and imperative moral order. By moral order I mean human rights as an absolute and universal principle, independent of tribe and tradition; the classic conservative critique of ethical and cultural relativism.

The logical extension of this line of reasoning denies the legitimacy of the American state, and aligns with the British claim that our revolution, at its origin anticolonial and antiaristocratic, has no basis in law, and with the claim of all states to rule their citizens without their consent personally as a contract.

Among the finest interrogations of this idea of moral order as authoritarianism can be found in Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.

In Jerzy Kosinski’s world, like that of William T. Vollman, moral order balances on a social contract guaranteed by force; a brutal and fallen world, but one in which true heroism is possible.

Little wonder that, once he became rich and famous on the basis of this book, his subsequent novels were mainly elaborately constructed Baroque fantasies of vengeance and the championing of the powerless. They also continue his exploration of Dante’s Inferno, displaying the consequences of sin and his role as an avenging angel. His work foregrounds personal sin as the origin of social evils; vanity and greed, materialism and the loss of communion as connection with others as well as the Infinite, sexual terror as a means of ownership and dehumanization, all the facades which abstract us from ourselves and one another. He wrote them to avenge the child he had once been, but also to shield others by exposing injustices.

And this is what killed him: his quixotic knight-errantry, truthtelling, and the authorial turning over of stones. Though his death was reported as a suicide, with a final note as proof, this is inconsistent with his obsessive survivalism, vigilante justice, secret identities, use of his public role as concealment, and his appropriation of intelligence tradecraft to evade enemies which included the Soviet Union he had escaped, and his personal mission of hunting evildoers. In life as in his fiction, Jerzy Kosinski was an avenging trickster who like the heroes of the messianic films The Magic Christian and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory constructed elaborate Dante-esque traps as purgatorial rituals. This is the author who became a role model for me as I worked through my trauma with his novel as my guide to becoming human; a Dark Knight and Avenger. He would have never abdicated his chosen role as a protector of innocents, for this is what sustained him and gave his tragedies and traumas meaning and made them bearable.

Jerzy Kosinski died as his forebears did, when their lances shattered on the unstoppable tanks of the invaders in a final charge of traditional meaning and value against a nihilistic barbarian modernity, glorious and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.

So we come to Being There, a deceptively simple story based on the fables of Krylov which retells the Biblical Fall of Man and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the return of Christ as the Second Adam from Exile as a redeemer.

As does his work as a whole and The Painted Bird especially, Being There presents at once a path of spiritual rebirth which unifies Catholic sin and Existential freedom, a Freudian political theory of government as force, a Sartrean critique of identity as a social construction, and a theory of history which re-evaluates and diverges from both Biblical teleology and Marxism, and written by a man who was once the Soviet Union’s greatest sociologist with a deeply personal stake in the issues and themes of his work rooted in profound childhood trauma.

First, it is a masterpiece, directly addressing the themes developed in The Painted Bird in the context of America, a new home where Jerzy Kosinski found celebrity, wealth, and power, (I would like to say safety, but these things cannot buy safety, and security is an illusion) but also a dehumanizing commodification, superficial materialism, and implicit class system with which he was not wholly comfortable even though he had married into the apex of New York society.

Both novels are meditations on Otherness; in one the bird which is painted to look different is pecked to death by his fellows, and in Being There someone who is truly different moves among us unhindered because he wears the colors of whatever flock he finds. Themes of concealment and illusion, identity and membership, the protection of assimilation or the danger and loneliness of being different are exhibited in both great books.

Change the protagonist and we have the myth and horror story of the skinwalker, a monster or cannibal predator who walks among us in disguise, or the tragic figure of the Elephant Man, whose virtue and beauty are hidden behind a hideous mask of flesh. Or an anonymous hero, a Batman-like figure standing the night watch for us all, as was the author Jerzy Kosinski to the last.

Second, Being There is powerful because it enacts a universal mythic pattern, and then breaks the pattern to create a new myth, maybe one more useful to us now.

What follows are my lecture notes on Being There, which I would hand out to my classes of High School Juniors and Seniors in the Honors Program and AP English (AP courses being preparatory classwork for taking the AP subject exams which can earn college units if passed- like A levels in British schools) and read aloud in parts as the class progressed through the book, stopping to ask questions and start discussions. I taught Being There as an introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; it can also be read as a companion text to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which shares its sources in Arthurian myth.

The works of Jerzy Kosinski came into my life through the influence of my mother, Coleridge scholar and expert on religious symbolism in medieval art, a Catholic university trained psychologist, biologist, and English teacher who, at my insistence after some time of Kosinski being a presence of references in our home while she wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet hospital case notes of his childhood therapy as compared to his own notes written between the ages of nine and fourteen ending when he regained the power of speech and which later became the basis of his novel, gave me The Painted Bird to read when I was seventeen. As one can imagine, we talked about it a lot.

I myself would not now do as she did then; its simply too disturbing and can cause real harm, though I was working though the trauma of battle and near execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school. If you are a survivor of private Holocausts, it can be useful; I might say the same of Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School, which I have taught to high school students who were survivors of sexual terror as was she.

As to other influences on the text of my lecture notes, I wrote it during my first year of teaching high school, and while I used it without changes for many years as a discussion prompt it reflects my interests and understanding at the time; I was in my third year of university and taking courses in Celtic Literature and Arthurian Romance while I wrote it, and reading Emma Jung’s Grail studies. My interpretations are also shaped by deep and lifelong interests, sparked by reading Frazier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, in Joseph Campbell and comparative mythology, fairytales, the archetypal psychology of Jung and Hillman, and a Great Books education through my teenage years. As I could count on no particular literary background among my students, to frame a discussion I had to tell the story; hence the brief retellings of references.

On Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There: a reading guide

Being There is a fable, a retelling of the story of the Original Man, and of his exile from Paradise and his redemption of the world as the Holy Fool. It parallels the story of Christ, the Fall of Adam and the return of the world to an Edenic state through the second Adam, the Innocent who goes shod in the temple. In Being There, the hero’s quest takes him to a citadel of Fallenness, where he must heal the wound of a Fisher King, in an initiation pattern found in Celtic pagan and Arthurian sources.

Early Christian legend says that Jesus was crucified on Calvary, the Mound of the Skull, where the skull of Adam is buried. He is depicted in early art as being hung from the Tree of Life rather than nailed to a cross, just as Odin hung from the World Tree Ygddrasil, a sacrifice to himself, in order to gain knowledge of the runes, universal organizing and informing principles. In the body of Jewish folklore and mystical gnosis called Cabala, the Tree of Life is a series of emanations from the Infinite called the sephiroth, worlds which form a ladder between our world and the Divine. Through astral projection and other practices, the cabalist reunites pairs of opposing principles within himself, just as the Redeemer of the Basilidians mounted through the planetary spheres to acquire their powers. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life were understood to be aspects of the same linking system.

Many mythic systems trace humanity to an Original Man, actually an inner man in whom all participate and share in the human spirit. This is clearly true of Adam, but also of the Purusha in India and Chung Ko in China, among others.

Parallel myths are structured on the idea of the Universal Monarch, such as Arthur, the Once and Future King. In both Christianity and Buddhism, the hero is a Holy Fool who forsakes the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer, just as Chance, incapable of relating to the world except as an innocent, will accidently become the President of America and restore the nation’s spirit.

Chance is evicted from the Garden of Eden and is cast into a fallen world; in the film the fallen state of the world surrounding his home is more clearly contrasted with the idyllic garden than in the book. When Chance is introduced to the world during a television interview, he unknowingly proposes to govern as a gardener tends his garden, returning it to a state of order and harmony. Chance is the Redeemer bringing about the Kingdom of God.

The lawyers who evict Chance are clearly Tempter figures; Chance defeats them when he declines to make a claim against the old man’s estate, as doing so would have kept him in Paradise and prevented him from fulfilling his role as Redeemer. While sitting under the Bo tree awaiting his vision of Enlightenment, Buddha is tempted by Mara in his terrible and seductive forms. Christ is also tempted, both to display his powers and to become World Monarch in a riddle match with Satan, prior to his vision of the Shekinah or Holy Spirit. But the Holy Fool must descend into the fallen world if he is to redeem it, and so in Islam the serpent is revered as Iblis, the Instructor, a guide of the soul and faithful servant of the Infinite. In all his forms, the Holy Fool must reject the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer.

People constantly misunderstand Chance; they misinterpret his words in their own context. He is both the sum of images he has internalized from television and the images others make of him; he is all mankind. He is a mirror; Jason kills the Medusa by polishing his shield to a mirror surface so that she sees herself and turns to stone. Chance has the power to transform others because he is the Inner Man in an innocent, unfallen state. Eve tells Chance, “You make me free. I reveal myself to myself, and I am purged.”

After leaving the Garden, Chance comes by accident to live in another house, the mansion of a powerful financier, Mr. Rand, and his wife, Eve. The mansion is a Castle Perilous, a material and fallen cage for a Fisher King. Chance goes from the Garden to this second house, and from a triadic relationship with the Old Man and the maid, Louise, to another with Mr Rand and Eve.

Both Mr Rand and the Old Man are dying; to understand the interaction between the major characters in Being There, let’s compare it to the mythic pattern in the Arthurian tale of Parsifal and the Grail Quest. Parsifal is an innocent, raised in seclusion as were Buddha and Chance. Parsifal goes into the world dressed as a fool or jester, riding an ass, and defeats his opponents in combat simply because he is too ignorant to be afraid and never hesitates to charge. He undertakes to find the Grail and bring it to Arthur, who is so sick he can’t get out of bed for seven years, during which time there is famine in the land. The period of the Wasteland is a representation of the fallen state of the world, which can only be healed through spiritual renewal. Parsifal reaches the Grail Castle, whose lord, the Fisher King, is in a position identical to Arthur’s; he is sick and his land is barren. The Fisher King is wounded through the thighs; just as Arthur fell ill when he lost Guinevere, the Fisher King fell ill when the virgin in whose lap his feet must rest was slain. Both rulers are cut off from the source of spiritual renewal and empowerment. Parsifal heals the Fisher King and gains a vision of the Grail by asking the question Buddha asked of his charioteer; “What is wrong with you?” Many other knights on the Grail Quest had failed to ask it, to much wailing and sorrow.

Like Parsifal, Chance is a figure of the Holy Fool, the child who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. When Mr Rand tells Chance, “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I’m ready to trade the Horn of Plenty for the Horn of Gabriel,” it is clear that in Chance he has found redemption.

From Garden to Wasteland and back again; Chance’s progression follows the quest of Dante for Beatrice, but without a transformative realization. Part of this initiation pattern can be seen in the tension of images between the Garden and the Wasteland.

The image of the Garden has an interesting history; in the Koran it is called Hasht Bihesht, the Eight Paradises visited by Mohammed on his Night Journey. Like the labyrinth-gardens of medieval Europe, the Islamic water garden reflected the order of a universe unfolding according to divine will, represented a plan of progress on the pilgrim’s journey toward the Infinite, and provided an immediate metaphor of rebirth in its cycles of decay and growth.

Dante’s vision of a multileveled universe is similar to the Koran’s; they also share the concepts of a divine mercy and justice in the afterlife, a vision gained in an Otherworld journey, and conceptualize the Infinite as inclusive of the feminine, the Beloved.

The English word “Paradise” has its roots in the Persian pairi, around, and deiza, wall; a walled garden. Its Greek form, paradeisoi, comes from Xeonophon’s Socratic discourse, the Oeconomics, a history of the Persian war of 400 B.C. Virgil referred to the sacred groves around Roman temples as a paradisus. The word first appeared in Middle English as paradis in 1175 in a Biblical passage” God ha hine brohte into paradis.”

The identification of Paradise with the Garden of Eden happened quite early, during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews from which they were released by Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. During this time, Judaism assimilated the Sumerian-Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh describes his vision of the Garden: “In this immortal garden stands the Tree, with trunk of gold and beautiful to see. Beside a sacred fount the Tree is placed, with emeralds and unknown gems is graced.”

Thus, at the end of the human journey we are brought to the beginning again. From its earliest times, Indo-European myth has held the idea of the afterlife as a return to the source and origin of life.

In Being There, the Garden is contrasted with the Wasteland, the pervading economic malaise linked to the impotence and illness of both Mr Rand and the President as types of the Fisher King.

Arthur’s Wasteland is a divine punishment for his inhumanity; Arthur mab Uthr means not “son of Uther” but “the Cruel”. The Historia Brittonum records that he once hanged two dozen children; in another incident he cut off the noses of the female relatives of a man who disturbed his banquet. Geoffrey of Monmouth based the figure of Arthur on the historical Macsen Wledig, a Welshman who became Emperor of Rome in 383 with the support of the legions in Britain. His story is told in the Mabinogi, in the tale of Culwich and Olwen. The literature of early Arthurian romance was written largely by monks both as a criticism of the system of chivalry and to connect Christianity to the Celtic literary heritage.

Mythically, Arthur, a name meaning “the Bear”, is a figure of the Celtic Lord of the Animals. The usual pattern has him paired with a double-aspected Goddess who is both Mother and Bride, in Celtic terms Gog and Magog, literally son, son of Mother. Grendel and his mother are another example.

In Being There, Chance’s relationship with the black maid, Louise, is superceded by that of Eve, Mr Rand’s wife. The dynamics between Louise and Eve are understandable in terms of the Goddess figures in the original sources from which the story of Eden was drawn in Genesis.

Adams first wife was Lillith, a sensual black demoness who lived in a cave. An embodiment of the forces of nature, she is represented as a Trickster figure in medieval Jewish folklore. Adam, himself Lord of the Animals, both claimed them and completed their creation in naming them. Adam was born both male and female, a figure of wholeness split into the sexes when Eve was made from his female half.

Eve’s banishment from the Garden is an Underworld journey paralleled by the story of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demeter as Eve is the Maiden aspect of Lillith, is abducted by Pluto, King of the Underworld, to reign as his queen during winter. Demeter descends to the underworld to rescue her, and wins her freedom for half of each year, during which the land is fruitful.

The transformation of Yahweh from King of the Underworld to an all-knowing, all-powerful creator was never complete in Judaism; until Roman times the Goddess was worshipped on a separate altar beside God. Even today, God’s wife, the Shekinah or Wisdom, is recognized in Jewish rituals such as the Lekha Dodi, which welcomes the Bride of God into the temple. In Christianity she became the Holy Spirit and Mary Theotikos, god-bearer or Mother of God. The Black Madonna found on many Catholic altars is a survival of Lillith, the Great Mother.

The Wasteland period in Arthurian romance begins when Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, is abducted by the mad Lancelot du Lac, a champion of the spirits, in Saxon called alven or elves, in Gaelic called sidhe. She is reclaimed in a cataclysmic war against the sidhe led by Morgan LeFay, the Faerie Queen. After his death, Arthur is sent drifting in a boat toward the Isle of Avalon, the realm of faerie, signifying his completion of the initiation process and return to the feminine source of being.

The Ramayana parallels major features of this initiation pattern. Rama is a Universal Monarch who wanders the jungle for nine years in a Wasteland period. His wife, Sita, who is a figure of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and wife of Vishnu the Incarnator, is abducted by Ravanna, King of the Demons. She is Tempted by Ravanna to become Queen of the Underworld, but remains faithful to Rama. Rama, acting as Lord of the Animals, gathers an army of six million monkeys and a number of bears and attacks Ravanna’s island. Together with Hanuman the Monkey King, he reclaims Sita in a battle which pits demons against men, beasts, and gods; rather like the war in Irish mythology of the Tuatha deDanaan against the demonic Fomorians who dwell beneath the sea.

The pivotal moment in Being There occurs when Chance fails to respond to Eve’s attempt at seduction. Incapable of sexual interest or Temptation, of initiation through assimilation of the feminine unconscious, Chance fails to unite with the Shekinah. The pattern of initiation, of internalizing projections or de-objectifying the Other, is disrupted. His mind, and the creative potential expressed by sexuality, is crippled by the wound of the Fisher King.

Kosinski leads the reader to expect a transformative event in this scene, and then diverges wildly from the expected. The jarring discontinuity alerts us to his real intent and contribution; the creation of a new myth, a modern myth in which man has no defining relationship to the world and must make his own.

The Temptation as an Underworld journey to reclaim the feminine creative force and emerge fully human, becoming an Original Man, is found in three sources which form a historical progression within a literary tradition. The direct antecedents of Being There are the story of Pwyll in the Mabinogi, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Wagner’s Parsifal.

In the first story of the Mabinogi, King Pwyll meets Arawn, King of the Underworld, while riding in the forest. They agree to trade places for a year; Arawn casts a spell which makes each look like the other. During this time, Pwyll is Tempted by Arawn’s Queen, but resists her. His initiation complete, Pwyll returns home to become a just and merciful king. The second half of the story articulates a linked myth, the Underworld journey of the goddess Rhiannon, which parallels that of Persephone.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a more sophisticated story, a synthesis of Christian and pagan Celtic elements. Gawain, linked to Parsifal in other stories as a contrasting-complementary character, is a development of the Irish hero Cuchulainn. The Green Knight is both Christ and the Green Man, Celtic god of vegetative rebirth whose leafy face can be seen as a decorative motif in English churches. A parallel trickster-initiator figure in Islam is the Green Genie Khidr.

Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are feasting at Camelot when a strange knight enters the hall bearing an axe, a man made of vines and leaves in green armor. He issues a challenge, and by the laws of chivalry the request of a guest cannot be denied once he has been admitted to the hospitality of the castle; one of them must strike off his head, after which the Green Knight will return the blow. Gawain agrees, to avoid Arthur’s loss of honor. He chops off the Green Knight’s head, and the Knight picks up his head and speaks; “In one year you will come to my castle, and I will return the blow.”

Gawain sets out on his quest a year later, and comes to the Castle Perilous, where he is tempted by its Queen. He resists, and is given her magic lace girdle to wear. Dressed in the Queen of the Underworld’s clothes, he goes to meet the Knight at a cavern called the Green Church. The Green Knight swings but stops his blow, just nicking Gawain’s neck in an act of redemption. The Green Knight tells him that the Castle Perilous is his own, and its Queen the wife of the Green Knight.

Parallel elements include the Underworld journey and Castle, the Temptation by an Underworld Queen, an exchange of identities with an Underworld King, and a wandering or Wasteland period. The Beheading Game is a retelling of Cuchulainn’s contest for the kingship of Ulster in the epic Bricriu’s Feast.

Chance is sent on an Underworld journey to Mr. Rand’s house, is Tempted by Eve, and takes the place of the Fisher King. The seduction scene is where the story of Chance breaks the initiation pattern. Like the Old Man, Chance bears the wound of the Fisher King. In the first chapter we learn, “The soil of his brain, the ground from which all his thoughts shot up, had been ruined forever.”

In Wagner’s opera Parzival, the theme of Redemption also hinges on a Temptation. Anfortas, the Fisher King, is wounded by the Spear of Longinus, which pierced Christ’s side at the Passion. Parzival’s experience with his objectified Other in the form of the sensual Kundry’s kiss triggers his despair and eventual redemption. The Holy Fool becomes Redeemer through unification with the unconscious.

Chance’s tragic flaw prevents him from undergoing a transformative initiation; he is the Holy Fool as pure symbol. Kosinski uses the interruption of a mythic pattern as social critique; the mold of man is broken. Like Theseus, we must find our way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, but without Ariadne’s Thread to guide us. Like Mersault in The Stranger, Chance is the ultimate image of modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness. He is, perhaps, the only Redeemer we deserve.

Or, perhaps Kosinski’s message is a more simple, hopeful one: First, we must recognize that we are on a journey toward becoming human. Second, we have no map of transformative process to guide us. Therefore, each of us must reinvent how to be human.

Chance’s redemptive power rests on his innocence; he is the child who speaks truth to power, who knows the Emperor has no clothes, an Adamic man in his uncorrupted state, the Fool who can achieve a vision of the Infinite.

Bodidharma, the founder of Zen, once had an interview with the Emperor of China.

The Emperor said to him, ” I have donated money to the poor, I have built orphanages, hospitals, and monasteries. How much merit have I accumulated in heaven?”

To which Bodidharma said, “None whatsoever.”

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